The boy dreamed of having two polish cans and racing them down the burn, but he had only one, until one day his father surprised him with a second empty can.
Holding one in each hand, he ran down the hill from the house, skirting the pig sties, and sprinting the length of the pig run, dodging from side to side to avoid imaginary enemy fire, leaping over pig wallows that resembled bomb craters, until, like a commando, vaulting over a barbed wire fence to the relative safety of the flax dams.
He loved that corner of the farm. Nobody ever went there. It was secluded and out of view of the house. There he had only the constant croaking of the frogs and the chirping of unseen birds for company. The dams had not been used for very many years and were silted and choked with reeds. Willow trees dangled the tips of their branches over the stagnant water. But on that day, he was on a mission.
He clambered over the bank and jumped into Taylor’s field. He was not allowed to leave their farm, but nobody could have seen him. There had been a lot of summer rain in the previous week and the burn was still quite full. He carefully placed the two cans in the water, side by side, holding them back with a long stick, before releasing them into the strong current. The race was on.
He ran across the field to where the burn entered the tunnel under the school. If he missed them there, they would be on their way to the sea. He waited patiently, but the cans did not come. He walked up the banks of the burn and found one can trapped in reeds and a little further, the other stuck in still water, sheltered behind a rock. He retrieved them and started the race again. He repeated the race several times. Sometimes one of them reached the tunnel, usually they both got stuck and he had to retrieve them.
It was a warm day and he grew tired of his game. He returned to the flax dams and sat on the bank in the afternoon sun, looking out across the fields, past the church to the slopes of Islandmore. He wondered where the source of the stream was. When he grew a little older, he would set off on an expedition to find it. At school he had learned of Livingstone and later, Stanley, searching for the source of the River Nile in Africa. He knew that there were two big rivers near his home – the rivers Bann and Bush. He would find their sources too. He wanted to be an explorer when he grew up.
He also wanted to be a mountaineer, like Edmund Hillary, and climb Islandmore and find out what was on the other side. And his teacher had recently told them of how the Vikings had struggled to herd their stolen cattle through the marshy land above Portrush, past where their schoolhouse now stood, and how they had been defeated at the nearby battle of The War Hollow. He wanted to search for swords and coins and other Viking evidence in the area around their farm. There was so much to think about.
But he was not always an all-action boy. His grandmother had showed him how to find, press and exhibit flowers and leaves. He was constantly on the look-out for a new addition to his collection.
Even though the boy had no friends to play with – his younger brother was still a baby, and there was no television, he had his imagination for company. And it accompanied him day and night.
He was a most contented child.
Of course the boy grew older, eventually went away, and when he returned, he realized that the burn beside the farm was just a shallow drain beside a field, that Islandmore was only a slight undulation on the North Antrim coast, and that the story of the Vikings and the War Hollow was likely just a legend. But his childhood dreams had been replaced by those of an adult and his imagination continued to be his constant companion.
He had become a most contented man.
The Irish Rover 